Daley Pearson

Writer / Director / Creator

Daley Pearson created, wrote, directed and produced the half-hour comedy pilot The Strange Calls for ABC TV. The pilot was picked up for series with Daley collaborating with award winning company Hoodlum Active. The Strange Calls centres on a young police officer transferred to a country town and relegated to answering the phones on night duty where the emergency calls get stranger each night. It was conceived as a multi-platform show that encourages audiences to engage with the characters and share their own ‘strange’ sightings via the website for the show and on Twitter.

In a network first, The Strange Calls increased viewers on its second episode outing. A put-pilot for a US adaptation of the show was commissioned with writer Donick Cary (The Simpsons, New Girl), director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) and Aaron Kaplan (The Neighbors) producing with 20th Century Fox TV. The US series replaces Coolum with Nantucket. In the fastest turnaround in Australian TV history, the sale to the US was made prior to its first airing on television in Australia.
Daley adapted another of his short films, $quid, as a feature starring Josh Lawson and Ed Kavalee. The film, $quid the Movie is set for release in 2014. He is developing a number of projects for television, film and multi-platform.

Most recently, Daley co-created series #7DaysLater, which takes comedy to the arena of interactive storytelling where the audience gets to write the brief via social media for each weekly episode that airs seven days later on ABC2. #7DaysLater won an International Digital Emmy® Award for Best Digital Fiction and is the first Australian production to fully integrate social media into a narrative (comedy or otherwise). The premise is that they have a core cast each week with one “guest star” (including the likes of Corey Feldman, Canadian impro-king Colin Mochrie). People vote (via twitter, Facebook etc) for a series of tasks they want their characters to perform, obstacle/hurdles they may face, tools they could use to resolve their dilemma, lines of dialogue they wish them to speak etc and then, seven days later the show goes to air.